over all the specks are good. 2TB HDD is a little much, in my opinion you wont ever need that much space. IF you were building it, which you aren't I would say drop to 1TB HDD and use the money on an SSD (the SSD is a small much faster hard drive that cuts boot time and speeds up the computer in general. they are new tech though and aren't standard in anything but hardcore gaming rigs). all in all it looks like a fine piece of hardware.

Sadly most pre built systems don't have the capacity to be upgraded very far. For this one the PSU is only 300 watts so if you upgrade anything in it the PSU will likely need to be upgraded as well. I don't like ASUS motherboards but that's really just a personal preference(I prefer Gigabyte motherboards).

You may want to get a better graphics card depending on what type of gaming you are going to do(eg facebook games don't need much graphics power - high end FPS games do). If it's not too taxing you can probably save yourself around 400 dollars for something decent as burning DVDs doesn't take much computing power at all. If the games use the frostbite engine(battlefield series) you may want to get a sound card as well because the games hard crash your system occasionally when using realtek sound.

You don't need 16GB of ram for anything unless you're going to be doing extremely heavy multimedia content creation(i.e. I'm going to make a Pixar movie), nor do you need Windows 8.

I'm finally going to break down and buy a PC, I'm going to use it for just about everything; streaming videos for online classes, burning dvds and CDs, playing games ( just a few), editing videos of family, general productivity, etc. I've been hearing good things about Asus and have been checking out this one. This is the model I've been looking at. (I know absolutely nothing about computers so there is no way in hell I'm going to attempt to build one.) Anyone have any experience that wants to throw in their two cents?

There's nothing like the uneasy feeling you get when you turn on a new machine for the first time.

Most retailers will put together your machine and test it for about $50 so you could get yourself a pretty good PC and for a few bucks get someone else to put it together and make sure it works nicely.

Are you going to need a monitor / mouse / keyboard? If so how large do you want the monitor and do you want a gaming mouse and / or keyboard(gaming mouse and keyboard cost around $150)?

Do you have a preference of what manufacturer you like(eg Intel or AMD for procoessor, nVidia or AMD for video card).

What is your budget?

Also, I noticed that you used newegg.ca, so I would presume you're in Canada. I like to use www.ncix.com for my parts(they price match - speaking of which www.pricefinder.ca/ is a decent price comparison site).

Building a computer from scratch is more of a hobbyist thing these days. You need to do a lot of comparison shopping and research to know what you are buying. Not the kind of thing you want to do for the first time building a system at this price range.

The system in the OP is quite good and will burn through most programs and games. Unless you want to play Battlefield 3 on max settings or something it is a good choice.

And a couple years down the line when it has served you well and you are comfortable, do some research, maybe watch a few youtube tutorials and upgrade the video card (and likely power supply) and it will probably treat you well for a few more years.